In my previous article about Virtua Fighter’s storyline (as told in Malibu’s Virtua Fighter #1) I noted the absence of Dural, the game’s main antagonist and final boss. Her exclusion from the comic may have been due to a number of reasons, but it was a curious omission considering how crucial a role she plays in the game’s narrative. Dural, and the game’s story as a whole, are inextricably tied to the technology rendering them.
Model 1
The SEGA Model 1 board was commercially released in 1992. Virtua Racing was the board’s debut title, though Virtua Fighter would follow shortly thereafter. The board boasted two sound chips (one for music, one for sound effects), a 496 x 384 pixel display resolution, and 16-bit colour. It was built specifically for 3D constructions, and was capable of rendering 180, 000 polygons/sec, as well as displaying details like specular lighting and reflection, giving it a slight edge over its main competition, the Namco System 21 board (SEGA Retro).
Virtua Fighter’s characters were complex, albeit obvious, polygonal constructions. They moved in convincing ways, and were capable of extraordinary, but not wholly unbelievable, martial arts feats. The way characters interacted with one another too was impressive, with transitions between hits and movements showing incredible reaction, like necks snapping back when hit in the head.
The character models, however, looked slightly awkward as a result of their blocky makeup, with matte colour texturing and the use of simple shapes to form facial features. In spite of their realistic movements, they were undoubtedly products of a computer, and the game’s title, Virtua Fighter, stressed that this was indeed an emulation of combat, not a fully realistic rendition of it.
The Dural character began as a sort of untexted test model for the game. Though it had feminine proportions, the model lacked any detail, and was simply textured grey, making her stand as an anomaly amongst the game’s otherwise human cast. From a gameplay standpoint, she borrowed movesets from all of the cast; from an artistic standpoint, she is the computer side of “virtua”, personified.
In the narrative, Dural is revealed to be Kage Maru’s mother, Tsukikage. She was a member of the Hagakure clan before being kidnapped by the J6 (the organization running the World Fighting Tournament), and ultimately being used to prototype their Dural technology.Whether this narrative was foreseen to span multiple games at the time of Virtua Fighter’s creation, or whether Dural was just a happy accident of a final boss, I don’t know, but it set a standard in tying the game’s storyline directly to the technology running it.
Model 2
Virtua Fighter 2 released just over a year after Virtua Fighter and ran on the Model 2 board. The Model 2 hardware was capable of rendering over double the number of polygons/second of the Model 1. It also featured texture mapping, which allowed for bitmap images to be pasted over top polygonal meshes for more realistic and varied looking models. In fact, Virtua Fighter 2’s characters have lower polygon counts than their Virtua Fighter counterparts, but look and move in more convincing ways thanks to the texture mapped bodies. This, along with a 60 fps frame rate and visual flourishes like transparency, rasterization, Z-buffering, texture anti-aliasing, and trilinear filtering, made for cleaner images, even if broadcasting at the same 496 x 384 resolution (albeit now with double buffering) (SEGA Retro).
Though built upon the foundations of the Model 1 board, the differences between Model 1 and Model 2 games is striking. Model 1 games felt like computer generated simulations, immersing players in their arenas with reactive gameplay and fierce audio feedback. Model 2 games felt less like computer generated simulations and more like virtual worlds – different and fantastical, but also recognizable.
The Model 2 board’s upgrades can be seen in details seemingly superfluous to the gameplay experience as well, like the backgrounds and lighting. Though the stages in Virtua Fighter 2 were still square arenas, each felt truly different from the last thanks to unique atmospheric effects. These details added a sense of drama to the fight, and tied each character to their own stage, suggesting story or personality traits outside of the gameplay loop.
Dural, once again the final boss, was the true showcase of the Model 2 board’s improvements over the Model 1. She still sported her monochrome grey texturing, but now with less overt polygonal seams thanks to the aforementioned texture mapping.
The arena in which you faced her was entirely unique as well, bringing characters down to the bottom of the sea for an underwater match. The speed (but not the frame rate) of the game was slowed down to emphasize the weight and resistance of each movement, forcing players to think farther ahead in their actions. Details like bubbles escaping from the character’s mouths were added for effect, though they were otherwise unaffected by being trapped underwater. It was a fitting, if bizarre, science fiction twist after what was, again, ten rounds of otherwise mostly grounded combat.If players completed the game on hard and defeated Dural, they were treated to a short, pre-rendered, cinematic of Dural’s metallic skin falling off her person to reveal Tsukikage underneath. It wasn’t much, but it gave a new vantage into the world of Virtua Fighter, both by acknowledging a narrative to the game and by telling it via a pre-rendered animation.
I am not sure what software was used to produce the pre-rendered cinematics in the Model 2 era, but Dural literally shedding the quads of her character model to reveal a texture-mapped character underneath was, perhaps, a direct allusion to the upgrades of the Model 2 over its predecessor.
Model 3
SEGA’s Model 3 board was unveiled in 1996 by way of a demo for Virtua Fighter 3. While fighting and motion capture were featured prominently in the showcase, the way that this new tech could be used to build character, tone, and narrative is ultimately the most interesting aspect of it. SEGA seemingly understood, and was fully embracing, why this technology mattered from an artistic perspective, rather than simply a mathematical one.
The demo begins with text of the Model 3 logo cut into a steel backdrop before one of the game’s new characters, Aoi, enters from the left, performing a Nihon Buyo dance. The screen then fades to a serene snow-covered landscape, with Aoi resuming her dance before assuming a Aiki-jujutsu stance. A demonstration of her moveset, along with how the game’s more complex reversal system, highlights the huge leap in animation from the Model 2.
However, it’s in details like Aoi’s flowing gown and bobbing hair that the platform’s power is truly showcased. This opening demonstration ends with a recap of the Model 3’s capabilities (including one-million polygons per second, sixty-million pixels per second rendering, perspective texture mapping, trilinear interpolation, high-specular gouraud shading, and anti-aliasing, just to name a few). Even if these technical specifications don’t mean anything to the average gamer, the benefit of their implementation was obvious in everything from Aoi’s movement to her character modelling, as well as the falling snowflakes and running water surrounding her.
The video continues with a demonstration from Lau, showing off the Model 3’s texture detail capabilities, as well as additions including head and eye tracking, before fading to another slide of Model 3 specs including zoning fog and levels of translucency. These aspects are stressed through further demonstrations by Pai, Jeffery, and Jacky in underground, tropical, and nighttime urban environments. Along with remodelling the arenas from simple squares into real locations with varying topography, the additional atmospheric effects made Virtua Fighter 3’s stages feel like part of a larger, fully realised, world.
The final segment of the video is dedicated to Dural, and nowhere are the Model 3’s advancements made more evident than in her showcase. The clip begins not with a recognizable character model, but with a liquid mass of reflective chrome. The camera lowers over this mass as it begins to rise and transform, the polygonal mesh moving from liquid to a human form. In the background, blue, red, and green lights reflect off this form until it becomes Dural. The scene then cuts to her hovering above the ground with her arms crossed over her chest as she begins to spin and twirl in the air. The camera orbits Dural as she spins in an effort to show the reflective nature of her skin before she lands on the ground, assuming a fighting stance.
Transferring to Jacky’s stage (a girder and panel construction with a glass floor lit by numerous spotlights) we’re treated to one final martial arts demonstration before the film ends. Real time reflections and lighting are the focus here, with Dural performing her moveset (framed from a variety of different camera angles), and showing how these perspective changes reflect in real time off of her chrome skin. Dural is once again, literally, the persona of the Model 3 board.
Pre-rendered Narration
Virtua Fighter 3 did, surprisingly, have a narrative-based cinematic as well. This short pre-rendered film didn’t tell much of a story beyond what players would have ascertained from reading the games’ instruction manuals; however, it cleverly mirrored the Model 3 video by way of using the new board’s technical advancements in its storytelling – even if only by allusion.
The Virtua Fighter 3 Story Video runs at just under two and a half minutes, and each character only gets a few seconds of screen time, but the film effectively communicates a sense of the happenings in the Virtua Fighter world, as told via a pantomime of technological display. The speechless montage gives a brief epilogue of the game’s events, portraying the characters’ personalities as they struggle with, or embrace, the tournament’s results.
It begins with street lights rolling over the surface of Jacky’s sports car as he drives down a freeway at night. The reflection of the lights are used to summon the memory of his sister. Later, a quiet suburban street where Lion finds himself a new friend gracefully transforms into a Japanese castle as Kage leaps onto the balcony, unsheathing a portable computer containing an animation of his mother melting back into the elusive metallic liquid of Dural. Pai’s muscles shift as Lau adjusts her stance; dust flows around Akira’s feet as he performs his kata in the desert; Water effects, ranging from beads of sweat, ripples on a serene pond, and even underneath the waves of the Indian Ocean as the midday sun soars overhead all pull from the technical aspects listed in the Model 3 video, like the boards’s lighting effects, geometarizer, and zone fogging. How the game’s cast would continue to navigate their world was, at this point in the series, seemingly dependent on what kind of world could be rendered for them to explore, challenging not only the definition of “fighting game”, but in how stories could be told in these virtual environments.
Virtua Fighter was just a fighting game with short blocks of text in the instruction booklet tying the cast’s motivations together. Yet, it was more than this on-paper drama that mattered. The game’s story advanced precisely because of, and in tandem with, its technology. Cinematics and storytelling could have been added to the first two games, and the third game still could have had much more overt cinematic storytelling in the vein of its contemporaries, like between match dialogues or ending sequence slideshows. Instead, the story grew slowly, from the seed of the Model 1 board to the flower of the Model 3. The story followed the technology, instead of the other way around, making Virtua Fighter something of an anomaly in not only the fighting game market, but in the world of video games. It didn’t try to emulate stage or cinema in its storytelling. Rather, the technology was the story.
The video’s score (likely by either Takenobu Mitsuyoshi or Takayuki Nakamura, the credits are unclear) goes a long way in immersing the viewer as well, seamlessly transitioning between characters with new instrumental arrangements, and the reserved but effective implementation of sound effects, like Jeffery breaking the surface of the water or Pai cracking the picture frame.
End Credits
Virtua Fighter isn’t really cyberpunk; rather, it is virtual reality, personified. As the game engine’s capabilities increased, so too did the stakes at play in the game’s overarching narrative. Facial expressions, dynamic polygonal meshes, spot lighting, and reflective surfaces built a world that was undoubtedly virtual, but emotionally and reactively mirroring our own.
Simply put, Virtua Fighter’s story couldn’t be told as anything except as a display of technology. Perhaps that’s why in the subsequent entries the narrative didn’t really propel forward; the series’ numerical entries increased at a much slower pace, too. Virtua Fighter 4 had three distinct versions, and Virtua Fighter 5 has had six distinctly named revisions over a twenty year period. While the series maintained its critical accolades, it stagnated in terms of its technical leadership. Virtua Fighter 3’s Taka-Arashi was even removed from the fourth game’s roster due to complications in implementing such a large character model. As of this writing, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is creating a new entry for the series. They have teased dynamic arena designs and cinematic flourishes, hinting that perhaps this long-awaited entry will not only be the first mainline entry to overtly tell its narrative in-game, but that the modified Dragon Engine running it will help convey that narrative in an authentic, ‘virtua’ kind of way.
References
SEGA Retro. “Digital Design Studio.” Accessed March 8, 2026. https://segaretro.org/Digital_Design_Studio
SEGA Retro. “Sega Model 1.” Accessed March 8, 2026. https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_1
SEGA Retro. “Sega Model 2.” Accessed March 8, 2026. https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_2